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I worked in television for a number of years in a technical behind-the-scenes capacity where I would have to flick switches and hit buttons on audio/scripted cu
by Theodores 10y ago
I worked in television for a number of years in a technical behind-the-scenes capacity where I would have to flick switches and hit buttons on audio/scripted cues. Sometimes this would take me from the script for what I felt was a long time and I would always struggle to get back to where we were in the script.
'Surely we must have gone through two pages of this double spaced script that only uses one half of the page in a large font?'
No
Invariably my guess on 'script progress' would be considerably greater than actual progress made. Even under ideal conditions where this was the nth retake and I knew what was coming up I would still find myself over-estimating how many words had been presented to the cameras. Years of experience did not change this, I always over-estimated how much had been read, trying to take into account the 'slow baud rate' didn't help.
If you do ever have a transcript of a video play the video and start reading. See how far you get through the video when you have finished reading. Don't make it a race, read as you normally might, taking time out to Google stuff etc. and you will be amazed at how much quicker the printed word is.
- rwmj 10y agoYeah I did a few "<subject> in 60 seconds" videos and the two lessons I learned from that? (1) They take hours and hours and hours of work to make. (2) Your script for the video must not contain more than 50 words, so you can say very little. (The above comment is 49 words)
- tremon 10y agoI read the above comment in less than ten seconds.
- bzbarsky 10y agoNot surprising: According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process)#Assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process)#Assessment reading for comprehension normally falls in the 200-400wpm range. 10 seconds to read 49 words is 294wpm, which is smack in the middle of that range. For comparison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_listening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_li... claims that 250wpm is the speed auctioneers speak at and that normal speech is 150-160wpm. Getting words spoken at you is terribly inefficient compared to reading them.
- mrob 10y agoTelevision is always slow paced, because it has to be comprehensible to people with a wide variety of language skills. Youtube, and most other video player software, has a speed setting with pitch correction. I watch everything at 1.5x speed which brings standard TV slow pacing up to natural fast-paced conversation speed. The majority of people here should have no problems understanding 1.5x speed. I don't watch live TV because 1x speed is too annoyingly slow.
- collinmanderson 10y agoI use 2x speed for YouTube videos. It takes some practice, but you can generally pick up almost all of what was said. Other <video> elements can be sped up entering this into the javascript console: document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 2 (There are also browser extensions that can do the same thing.)